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Using Biographical Methods in Social Research provides an informative, comprehensive, accessible and practical guide to the nature and use of biographical methods, combining a consideration of theoretical issues with practical guidance. Barbara Merrill and Linden West consider important questions about what research is for, what makes it valid, to the practical business of interviewing, analyzing and writing up of biographical data. The authors draw on their sociological and psychological orientations to provide a truly interdisciplinary approach to the subject, and provide numerous examples o

"Rooted in a long and diverse genealogy, biographical approaches have developed from a focus upon a single story, a 'life story' and personal documents (e.g. diaries), to encompass (more routinely) autobiographical secondary and archival research and analysis--as well as multi-media, arts based creative multi-sensory methods. Biographical Research and practices as part of human understanding helps people to make sense of what has been and what is happening in their lives, cultures, communities and societies.Advances in Biographical Methods: Creative Applications takes up these themes: theorising, doing and applying current advances in biographical methods. It demonstrates the momentum with which they areas are developing as a field of scholarship, especially in relation to creative innovations and applications, such as in new forms of interview and other practices, and debates on its interlinking with art, performance and digital methods"--

The feminist biographical method is an in-depth interpretive methodology that is useful for research in the field of psychology. I believe that this qualitative method is an excellent tool for analyzing individual narratives of participants lives in relation to the larger cultural matrix of the society in which they live. Although an oral interview is often the primary strategy employed for data collection in this methodology, other sources of information such as personal journals, official documents, and cultural texts are also exciting additions to the research. The strengths of the feminist biographical method include the depth, context, and meaning found in the research; the inclusion of women's experiences and voices in academic research; and the ability to conduct a sociopolitical analysis of potentially marginalized people. In this article, I delve into the feminist biographical method by providing discussion and examples from research in the field, as well as from my own research. I provide the reader with a personal narrative on how-to conduct research using the feminist biographical method. In particular, I delineate the process of researching the lived experiences of women international students in difficult relationships. As a psychological researcher, I encourage others in the field of psychology to consider using the feminist biographical research to add context, depth, and richness to studies involving human participants.

Die Biographieforschung, die mit niedergeschriebenen oder in Interviews erzählten Lebensgeschichten arbeitet, ist in den Sozial- und Humanwissenschaften längst nicht mehr nur eine Methode unter anderen. Sie hat sich insbesondere in der Soziologie (Fischer-Rosenthal 1991; Fuchs-Heinritz 1998) und in den Erziehungswissenschaften (Krüger & Marotzki 1999) mittlerweile zu einer Teildisziplin mit allgemeintheoretischem Anspruch etabliert. Auch in den Geschichtswissenschaften hat die Oral History, deren VertreterInnen biographische Interviews als weitere Quelle für ihre Analyse historischer Epochen nutzen und meist auch mit narrativ-interpretativen Methoden arbeiten (vgl. v. Plato 1998; Sieder 1999), zunehmend an Bedeutung gewonnen. Dagegen fehlt es der Biographieforschung in der Psychologie – insbesondere in der deutschen akademischen Psychologie – noch weitgehend an Anerkennung. Dies geht auf den positivistischen Mainstream der Psychologie zurück, die sich weit mehr an den Naturwissenschaften als an den Traditionen verstehender und hermeneutischer Ansätze orientiert. So ist es auch nicht erstaunlich, dass die Diskussion um biographische Methoden in der Psychologie häufig noch mit dem Anspruch auf Repräsentativität und numerische Verallgemeinbarkeit, die auf der Häufigkeit des Auftretens eines Phänomens beruht, geführt wird. Dies manifestiert sich vor allem bei der Auswertung von zunächst noch offen oder halbstandardisiert erhobenen "Daten", bei denen – z.B. von Hans Thomae - eine Verknüpfung qualitativer mit quantitativen Verfahren zum Ziel der Verallgemeinerung angestrebt wird. Thomae (1991, S. 522) integrierte bereits Mitte der 50er Jahre biographische Daten in seine Analysen und reagierte damit zu Recht auf ein Defizit an genetischen Konzepten. Andererseits disqualifiziert er aufgrund seiner quantitativen Grundorientierung die interpretative Biographieforschung als "essayistisch" und "neudeutsch".

The turn to biographical methods in social science is yielding a rich harvest of research outcomes and invigorating the relationship between policy and practice. This book uses a range of interpretive approaches to reveal the dynamics of service users' and professionals' individual experiences and life-worlds. It shows how biographical methods can improve theoretical understanding of professional practice, as well as enrich the learning and development or professionals, and promote more meaningful and creative practitioner-service user relationships

The article deals with the methodological foundations of the biographical method in the context of digital humanities. The bidirectional character of biography leads us to the problem's methodological level: social predicament of the individual world and reciprocal determinability of the social world by the individual world. The biographical method is closely linked to thematization of subjectivity. The biographical method' s methodological problems are connected with context, reference, authenticity, and reflexivity. The authors link the biographical method with memory studies and emphasize that the turn to memory is associated with many theoretical questions and controversies related to the status of history as a science and its relation to the field of human memory. The multidirectional biography studies reveal the lack of a conceptual apparatus, common for the interdisciplinary space of humanities, which allows to develop the criteria for comparability of scientific research results. The authors associate the further development of the biographical method with the development of the modern information society. They note the prospects of using the methods of digital humanities associated with the search, selection and analysis of texts presented in digital form. The rationale for this thesis is that at present there is a constant increase of electronic texts that can be used both for the development of the biographical method and serve as its empirical base. The article demonstrates the possibility of applying the biographical method using the tools of digital humanities on the examples of research on the history of science, which are part of the world's cultural heritage.

The article deals with drug use by young Roma as members of a marginalized population. It reflects on the use of collages and of metaphor analysis on images produced by participants within an action-research approach. Additionally, various stakeholders were involved in a participatory manner in defining research questions, priorities and strategies. In order to understand young Roma's perceptions on drugs, 23 visual focus groups and 58 life-story interviews were conducted in five European countries. In the focus groups, young people built collages to represent drugs and then explained their meanings. Metaphor analysis was used to analyze the data. With the biographical interviews, histories of consumption from drug users were gathered. Among the trends identified are the early onset of tobacco use, exposure to consumption of alcohol by adults, underestimation of the consequences of many drugs, addiction to injecting drug use in specific areas. Gender roles are strongly associated with patterns of consumption. Roma young people also express belonging and reclaim positive social status by using certain types of drugs and by sharing consumption patterns with non-minority young people. The research process also illustrates how qualitative research can contribute to selective prevention programs. (author's abstract)

Purpose. To update the question of using the biographical method and establishing its interrelation with other scientific methods and methodological principles in historical and anthropological research. Theoretical basis. Consideration of the biographical method in historical and anthropological studios carried out in the course of the general theoretical "renaissance" of classical humanitarianism, which is largely due to the uncertainty and ambiguity of theoretical discourses and discursive practices of postmodernism, pose to the researcher a number of new tasks. Among them there is "discovery of the implicit" i.e. not just the description of the results of human cultural activity in the immediate given, but the disclosure of sometimes unconscious mechanisms of this activity, of the deep "springs" of culture that ensure its movement. Originality. The authors of this research do not touch on the sociological issues of biographical research, which are widely represented in the writings of contemporary Western researchers. The subject of our message is a biographical method that is genetically derived from Ch. A. Sainte-Beuve, who believed that the main task of the biographer is to carry out an analysis of the personality of a prominent person. The research in the realm of humanities in general and in civil history in particular should take into account not only the changes in the sociocultural aspects of being, but also the corresponding transformation of methodological approaches to the analysis of the epiphenomena of "fluid modernity". This obvious fact led us to an understanding of the need for a historiosophical study of the problem of reception of a biographical method in historical and anthropological works with the subsequent historical, philosophical, cultural representation of the biographical method. Conclusions. The historiosophical transformations of the last decades, with their radical change in concepts, methods and techniques, return the researcher to the improvement of the biographical methodology that today represents anthropocentrism, which fills the science with humanistic content. The use of this methodology requires from a scientist to adhere to the basic methodological principles and mastering other scientific methods, primarily dialectics.

The article argues that biographical methods are particularly suited to shift the methodological and theoretical premises of migration research to foreground the agency and subjectivity of migrant women. It is argued that structural and cultural readings can usefully be applied to the self-representations of migrant women. The context of migrant women's self-representations is explored through looking at the story-telling communities they develop and through the expert knowledges of institutions regulating migration. The dichotomisation of unique versus collective modes of life-stories is questioned. Applying the Foucauldian concept of subjugated knowledges, it is argued that migrant women's life-stories hold transformative potential for producing knowledges critical of gendered and ethnocised power relations that research should pay attention to.

Franco Ferrarotti hopes to lead sociologists away from overly reductionistic, technical measurement of their subjects_an approach that has increasingly been problematized by the natural sciences_toward a rediscovery of (auto)biographical materials and the value of the individual

This paper discusses a participatory arts-based research project undertaken with a refugee support organization in the United Kingdom, the Regional Refugee Forum North East (RRFNE), and a local women's group. The project used photography, storytelling, and walking methods to explore ways of seeing women's lived experiences, well-being, and sense of community in the context of their lives in the North East of England. Arts-based biographical methods, predominantly photo-walks, were undertaken within a participatory action research frame. Together the women cocreated a collective story that involved collaborative knowledge production as well as corporeal attunement and empathic witnessing through walking their stories of living in the North East of England.

Die Wiederkehr des Subjekts in den Sozialwissenschaften reflektiert zugleich ein gewachsenes Interesse an wissenschaftlichen Untersuchungen zu Subjektivität: zu den Möglichkeiten, die Individuen haben, Lebenssinn zu finden in den strukturellen (Zwischen-) Räumen der Gesellschaft.MERRIL und WEST verstehen ihr Buch als Referenzpunkt für die Nutzung biografischer Methoden in der zeitgenössischen Forschung, für die Beschäftigung mit deren Ursprung in sozialwissenschaftlichen Studien und für die Auseinandersetzungen mit methodologischen und ethischen Implikationen eines solchen Forschungsansatzes. Meine Besprechung beschäftigt sich mit dem Nutzen des Buches (u.a. dem didaktischen und interdisziplinären Charakter des Bandes, den Inhalten selbst) und versucht von hier aus dessen Beitrag für die Lehre (insbesondere im Bereich biografischer Forschungsmethoden) zu eruieren.